Since the inception of consumer photography, over 120 years ago, numerous innovations have been developed to ease the costs and complexities of taking, viewing, and sharing photographs. The original invention of flexible roll film provided the ability to record multiple, sequential, photographs without glass plates, chemicals, and reloading cameras. This innovation combined with the simple, inexpensive, and easy to use “box camera” (U.S. Pat. No. 388,850) and centralized photo processing made picture taking more affordable and accessible. Innovations such as easy-to-load film cartridges, motorized film advance, automatic exposure, electronic flash, automatic focus, one-time use cameras, compact cameras, and zoom lenses were all directed at reducing the burden of photography. In addition, the development of integrated photo-processing equipment or “mini-labs” and “photo kiosks” made photo-processing and printing in retail environments feasible.
More recently, the development of digital cameras has provided significant benefits. Digital cameras are a common and widely used consumer electronics product invented at the Eastman Kodak Company and used by many people to record images and events in their lives. However, such cameras have also placed new burdens on consumer photographers. The conventional process for acquiring and managing digital images is cumbersome. Digital cameras with complex control mechanisms and modes are used to acquire images. Digital images are typically captured with an electronic sensor integrated circuit in response to a user-operated control and stored in a memory in the digital camera. After some period of time, the camera is plugged into a computer through a wired interface such as a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector and downloaded through an interface to a computer. Wireless information transfer systems employing WiFi protocols and hardware over local area networks and point-to-point wireless transfers such as Bluetooth® are also known. The computer executes an image-transfer program to transfer digital images from the camera to a storage device controlled by the computer, for example rotating magnetic media such as a disk. A complex software program can then be used to manipulate, store, print, or otherwise employ the digital images. The images can be viewed, manipulated, printed, and permanently stored on the computer or with an on-line service over the Internet.
Although digital cameras eliminate the costs and complexity of film usage and processing, the user of digital photography systems must overcome a wide variety of problems. Various incompatible file formats, numerous incompatible memory card formats, image file transfer, image file storage and access, on-line image file storage, incompatible computer devices with incompatible software and interfaces, computer-centric software, and post-capture operations have all added to the complexity and costs of photography. Organization, storage, and redundant backup of personal photo collections, sometimes including many thousands of digital images and video clips, become the responsibility of the photographer. Simple photo albums, shoeboxes, and slide trays that were once the final repository of irreplaceable images were directly viewable and readily understood and used. Photographic prints, slides, and negatives are today replaced by digital-media collections. These digital-media collections are often scattered across the hard drives of several different computers, on various types of digital storage devices such as removable hard drives, optical disks, Photo CDs, CDs, DVDs, and memory cards.
On-line storage accounts provide a new method to aggregate digital media collections and assure redundant back up, but these systems require the user to periodically upload their newly acquired digital images to the on-line storage account and are subject to the rules, limitations, and fees established by the on-line storage provider. Automatic backup to on-line storage accounts can be limited to single computers with an established identity and network address.
Many digital cameras require the interactive use of a computer to transfer images from the camera to a secondary storage device or system. In addition, file formats and storage devices become obsolete as new digital cameras and computers become available. All of these problems interfere with the simple pleasure of taking and using photographs. In particular, digital photography practitioners must accommodate a variety of computers and computing devices, complex, non-standard user interfaces, complex workflows, image-storage management, security challenges, and incompatible image storage formats.
The use of computer networks with a variety of connected electronic devices, including storage devices is known, for example as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,928,476 and U.S. Patent Application Publication 20050060700. U.S. Pat. No. 6,678,737 describes data management units on computer networks with associated display devices. Content management systems and networks are described in U.S. Patent Application Publication 20060026171, U.S. Patent Application Publication 20050177869, in U.S. Patent Application Publication 20050125484, and in U.S. Patent Application Publication 20040162900. Systems for storing, sharing, and displaying digital images in a common collection, including images obtained from digital cameras are known, for example as taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,024,051, 7,724,285 and 7,675,554. However, none of these systems provide a simple, low cost, and straightforward system or method for interacting with, managing, storing, and controlling digital images in a distributed consumer environment.
The use of WiFi wireless connectivity for communication between a camera and a computer is known. Likewise, wireless computer networks are known, as are various computer peripheral devices that interact with each other and the computer wirelessly through the computer network. Wireless data storage devices that wirelessly interact with a computer are also known. However, such networks do not overcome the challenges of prior-art digital imaging systems, particularly in a distributed system with remote locations. U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,742,084 and 7,701,490 describe transferring images from a digital camera to desired locations through a wireless network. U.S. Pat. No. 7,849,199 describes a system for routing changes to information between a plurality of content nodes such as mobile telephones and email accounts. Storage systems available on a network are also known and commercially available. Since many consumers eventually create image collections of thousands or tens of thousands of images, a large amount of storage can be needed.
Because digital cameras have limited memory sizes, acquired images must be frequently transferred to a computer or other storage device. Furthermore, because a user's computer is generally at a single location although the digital cameras are mobile, it can be inconvenient to transfer images stored in a digital camera to a computer. Thus, the usefulness of the digital camera can be limited, particularly when a user is traveling.
Users are also concerned with the security of their stored digital images. Since personal images frequently have great emotional significance to users, ensuring the survival of the digital images in case of calamity, for example a hard disk crash or a household fire or flood, is important to users. Such security is typically provided with storage backup systems operated by the computer or with on-line storage. If stored on a single memory system that fails, the images can be permanently lost. To avoid such a loss, backup systems such as RAID devices and on-line storage services are available. Despite this need, typical users do not employ backup support for their personal digital images, largely because of the complexity of such systems. Managing RAID systems can be complicated and inefficient and on-line storage services can be expensive and slow, since image collections can be transferred at slow transfer rates to the on-line service. Moreover, RAID systems can be difficult to incrementally enlarge, inflexible, can require central controllers, and are not directly accessible over a distributed network. U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,764,290 and 7,271,780 address the issue of an archival storage system with an external memory system for use with an imaging system. However, further improvements and simplifications can be made, particularly for remote access.
In general, users find the interactive use of computers for receiving, storing, viewing, and using their images to be complicated, tedious, and expensive, with many barriers to access, particularly for mobile digital cameras. There is a need therefore, for an improved system and method for capturing, transferring, and storing digital images in a digital storage system.